Are Sandforce Controllers really that sketchtastic?

So looking at a lot of the more tech-informed members of NBR, a lot tend to use a SATA III SSD2 with a Marvell Controller (Intel 510, Crucial M4, Corsair P3, etc.) over the faster but also less reliable Sandforce SSDs. I have seen some posts online regarding BSOD issues with some Sandforce controller SSDs...but aren't such problems now remedied? and aren't the issues we have seen so far like a very very small precentage of all Sandforce SSDs?

 

The problems are largely remedied but OCZ still seems to have quality control / reliability issues judging by their failure rates and the number of people complaining about them failing / BSOD etc

 

No and not really, no.

Some issues have been fixed, but there is still an alarmingly high number of people reporting failures, even on the so-called "fixed" drive models. OCZ is particularly bad in this, they insist all the issues are customer issues, but I've seen numbers indicating it is roughly 20-25% of all their Sata 3 drives that are failing. That's concerning. Sandforce 12xx controllers (SATA 2 from last year) were bad, but there were and are even MORE issues with the new ones.

Maybe the problems are being fixed, but Sandforce is not inspiring confidence in how they do business. They rush these things out without testing them well, and the consumer ends up being the guinea pig.

 

I see. Any problems with Sandforce SSDs other than OCZ? like Patriot? etc.?

 

Fewer issues by far, but still issues. I think it was Corsair or one of those that had a partial recall a couple months ago. But it's mostly OCZ not giving a crap about the customer, coupled with Sandforce not really testing things correctly. There's a reason Intel, Crucial, and Samsung were later with their SATA 3 drive releases. THEY DID TESTING to find the major issues. The only other outstanding issue, the LPM issue with the M4, was fixed quickly through firmware.

 

Just stick with the Intel SSDs man...Reliability does matter, the price difference is negligible, you will never see a speed difference.

 

Am I correct in the belief that Sandforce is not a fab but an intellectual property company? If so, then would the issues be more related to what manufacturers drive you buy since they are responsible for the actual fabrication?

 

they write the firmware(basically specialized OS) for the controller(which is just a special computer that is MIPS based). And all they problems they have are not about fabrication because that is the least possible component that fails(neither the controller nor the NAND nor the board). Simple program bugs(or fails to handle corner cases).

 

To elaborate, the controller hardware is extremely generic (if there were a problem, all sorts of embedded devices would be failing), the NAND is the same stuff Intel, Crucial, and/or Toshiba are using, and the PCB is partner-specific, so if there were a problem it'd be confined to just OCZ or Corsair or Patriot or OWC.

So by process of elimination, it's safe to say Sandforce bears the responsibility for the vast majority of failures.

 

All Sandforce drives on Newegg show bad reliability. Doesn't really matter what brand.

For reliable SSDs: Crucial M4 and C300, Samsung 470 and Intel X25m and 510.

Intel 320 will be added to that list when the new firmware arrives.

 

That's it.

I *don't* want a drive that is 5% faster and that has 500% more failure rate than intel.


--

 

Much much more than 5% but then the Crucial drivers are also faster so I would go for them.